PAT-Questions: A Self-Updating Benchmark for Present-Anchored Temporal Question-Answering

Jannat Meem, Muhammad Rashid, Yue Dong, Vagelis Hristidis


Abstract
Existing work on Temporal Question Answering (TQA) has predominantly focused on questions anchored to specific timestamps or events (e.g. ‘Who was the US president in 1970?’). Little work has studied questions whose temporal context is relative to the present time (e.g. ‘Who was the previous US president?’). We refer to this problem as Present-Anchored Temporal QA (PATQA). PATQA poses unique challenges: (1) large language models (LLMs) may have outdated knowledge, (2) complex temporal relationships (e.g. ‘before’, ‘previous’) are hard to reason, (3) multi-hop reasoning may be required, and (4) the gold answers of benchmarks must be continuously updated. To address these challenges, we introduce the PAT-Questions benchmark, which includes single and multi-hop temporal questions. The answers in PAT-Questions can be automatically refreshed by re-running SPARQL queries on a knowledge graph, if available. We evaluate several state-of-the-art LLMs and a SOTA temporal reasoning model (TEMPREASON-T5) on PAT-Questions through direct prompting and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). The results highlight the limitations of existing solutions in PATQA and motivate the need for new methods to improve PATQA reasoning capabilities.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-acl.777
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
13129–13148
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.777
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jannat Meem, Muhammad Rashid, Yue Dong, and Vagelis Hristidis. 2024. PAT-Questions: A Self-Updating Benchmark for Present-Anchored Temporal Question-Answering. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024, pages 13129–13148, Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
PAT-Questions: A Self-Updating Benchmark for Present-Anchored Temporal Question-Answering (Meem et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.777.pdf